Mormon Open Forum

Well, I may have ruffled some feathers over at Nine Moons with a comment I left at a great post by Ned Flanders http://www.ninemoons.typepad.com/home/2005/07/missionary_phil.html. Ned’s post focuses on the need for missionaries to know more about the culture, history, art, literature, etc of the area they’ve been assigned (In many parts of North American, that would be difficult given the diversity here, but I digress). Here’s my controversial comment:

“Great post. Let’s face it; most of our apostles aren’t up to the job of running a worldwide church. Our mission program is a pathetic joke run on autopilot with a few Band-Aids like the new discussions. Most GA’s don’t give a rat’s ass about the efficacy of the program or the missionaries. If they did, it would be on a continuous improvement program like everything else they do care about is. We really need a mechanism for old worn out GA’s to step down like Lehi did to yield to a new generation of visionary leadership that will fix these things.”

A Capt Jack concurred w/ my comment, but Rusty and Steve H somewhat took me to task for being overly critical or at least for using inflammatory language. Because my comment is a general complaint about our missionary program and fossilized GA’s, as opposed to Ned’s more focused topic, rather than threadjack by responding further there, I decided to flesh out my complaints here at Mormon Open Forum, the bleed valve of the Bloggernacle.

The essence of my negative comment above is actually positive. I am truly convinced we can do much better job rather than continue following the same failed path, generation after generation, that just doesn’t work. I have a son on a mission now. It’s appalling to me how little the program has changed for the better since I served. And the missionary program was an anachronism even then. Before my son left, I read a letter his mission pres sent him about the importance of “exact obedience” being critical to success, yada, yada, yada. You know, à la Drawing on the Powers of Heaven crap of do A+B+C = lots of baptisms. Yes, I bit my tongue, because the obedience thing is probably good advice when one is in the training phase of one’s mission. But I did explain to him that once he was into the program, being an effective and happy (as opposed to totally obedient) missionary can get complicated.

As I’ve commented elsewhere in the Bloggernacle, I loved the people I was honored to serve and led my mission in effectiveness. I openly attributed my relative success to largely ignoring mission rules and teaching methods that didn’t fit the people and their culture. I was labeled a complete but lucky pagan by many “arrow” missionaries. As an example, in July and August, when virtually the whole country was on vacation and eating dinner at 10 p.m., my comps and I would often be out teaching people until 1 a.m. as the wine flowed freely (not for us) to facilitate discussion. Obviously we weren’t out the door at 9 a.m. in the summer. My slogan was work hard, play hard, and many a Friday night “pagan” missionaries would gather to play poker and have “molaroff” parties (chocolate frosted shortbread cookie eating contests) just to maintain our sanity. Those parties were much more invigorating towards our true callings than any Zone Conference.

The point of that digression is I did things on my mission for the benefit of the people I served and my fellow missionary volunteers that were at complete odds with church instruction. Many a mission Pres would have sent me home in a heartbeat for my insubordination, regardless of the offsetting effectiveness or good intentions of my innovations. In other words, our church leaders, either through inaction or action often can thwart the very objectives they set. To those of us in the “real world” it’s obvious if we’re assigned an objective, and the plan, tools or training we have don’t fit the tasks needed to complete the objective, it’s time to immediately change the game plan. The GA’s seem perfectly content just to passively accept continued failure.

Some other complaints: I’ve never met an RM who served in India, a country of over 1 billion living souls! If we have any missionaries there it’s far too few. Yes, I know there’s religious violence there, but since when did that stop us before? I’ll tell you what, rather than this “raise the bar” BS, we could just take all the former fornicating youth and send them to the hazardous duty countries like India. I was one of those bad boys, and I made a great missionary baptizing several people and finding several others that joined later and that was in Western Europe, considered a mission hell hole by many LDS. And then there’s the other super populous country, China. Yes, the Chinese government isn’t yet enlightened enough to move toward freedom of religion, but there are many things we could be doing to encourage the process. Then there’s our completely ineffective methods we use in the countries we’re already in like having our bike riding missionaries wear that dorky white dress shirt w/ tie and sometime w/ suit jacket. Honestly, would you want to talk to two cultish looking weirdo geeky dorks about anything? I’m all for some kind of missionary uniform that fits a particular country’s culture, but we’ve locked into really stupid period clothing for our poor missionaries. I remember finding more people to teach on the golf course in Europe on P-day than any other day of the week; I wonder why? In short, the GA’s are just a sleep at the switch and brain dead when it comes to running an effective missionary program.

So there it is, a missionary program frozen in a time wrap when so much else about the church has continuously improved. This is so much better a church overall than it was a generation ago. It’s obvious to me the GA’s care about some stuff and not other stuff. But missionary work is the primary responsibility of the apostles, and they are failing at their core responsibility.

An effective missionary program is a very high mental energy thing, that has to take into account a lot of local/national issues, etc, and old men of understandably diminished capacity just aren’t up to the task. The best missionaries add to the faith of others w/o tearing down what they already have. Saint Patrick, for example, converts an entire nation to Christianity in one generation, but would his methods have worked anywhere but Ireland at that time? I doubt it. So, to cut to the chase, my real beef is we have no retirement tradition for worn out apostles.

To the older apostles: early in the BofM father Lehi sets an example of stepping down to yield leadership to a new generation. So we already have a precedent for what you need to do. If you’re waiting for some word from the Lord, he has already given it to you. In other words, it’s ok to retire when you’re no longer up to the task. Draw a pension; you’ve more than earned it. You can do light duty church service if you care to, but yield the authority to younger people with the energy and vision the Lord needs to get the job done.